Talking to the Sicilian prosecutor Giuseppe Ayala, who brought the accusation against the great families of Nostra thing in the first major process held in Palermo, between 1986 and 1987, is to speak with a survivor, someone who was not clear that he was going to stay alive. After spending 19 years with an escort, he remembers the first day they took it away, in 2003. “I didn’t know what to do, free for the first time. I remember that I went to the supermarket, I had not been going to the cinema, or a restaurant for almost 20 years, ”he says at his home in Palermo.
Today he is 79 years old and continues to smoke Dunhill cigarettes, removing the filter before. Ayala, Basque surname that comes from Spanish ancestors arriving in Sicily, was a companion and friend of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the prosecutor who collaborated with them for ten years in the first major judicial crusade against the Sicilian mafia from 1983. They sat down for the first time the mafia families on the bench in a historical trial, the so -called Maxiprocess. Falcone and Borsellino paid him with life in 1992, in terrifying attacks that marked the beginning of an authentic mafia war with the State, in full political collapse, which lasted until 1994. Then he became calmly, mysteriously. It is a period still full of enigmas, where great secrets and questions pending response of Italian democracy move.
Ayala wrote in 2007 a book with his memories of those intense and dramatic years, Who is afraid dies dailywhich now publishes in Spain the Editorial Gatopardo with a translation by David Paradela López. It is a good reason to visit him at his home in Palermo, remember again and know what he thinks now, with perspective. He continues to think of a phrase that Falcone told him, in 1989, when he escaped an attempt at the attack, explosives placed on the sea with the sea next to the villa where he summened. “He called me, I went to see him and told me that I saw behind ‘refined minds’ capable of guiding the decisions of Nostra. He was convinced. And I have always taken it on top of the death of Giovanni and Paolo, ”he explains.
The book reflects well the climate of a heroic and extraordinary company, which was born in the Palermo court around Falcone and Borsellino, on whom the story gravitates. In fact it is the subtitle of the book, My years with Falcone and Borsellino. Armored lives, the feeling of being breaking a taboo of centuries and of entering forbidden territory, a work team that was more than work. Ayala went down every afternoon at the end of the day to Falcone’s office, which took a bottle of whiskey from a closet. “The personal bond that joined us was very important, because at first we didn’t know where we would get. We were really a team, beyond work, in the most human sense. Giovanni and I went on vacation together, ”he recalls.
The idea that changed everything in the fight against the mafia, since 1980, was to create a team of magistrates, a poolas it was called in Italy with the usual predilection of this country for the terms in English. He pool of Palermo. In this way it was not a single judge who signed the cars, with the risk of being exposed to Nostra, but a team. Not being alone was essential to fight the mafia. In fact, over time, in the darkest part of this story, Falcone and Borsellino were staying alone, the institutions turned their backs, and that was when the mafia killed them. Falcone’s research method was revolutionary, following money, rebuilding the international drug plots traveling to other countries, working with the FBI.
In the eighties, the rise of the brutal clan of the Corleoneses of Totò Riina was like a coup within the mafia. They were massacrating their opponents and the traditional clans of Palermo. In that climate, with 300 homicides a year, something unthinkable was possible: repentant began to emerge on the loser side. Above all, a history, the Tommaso Buscetta capo, arrested in Brazil in 1984 and who accepted to speak with Falcone. “We had the mosaic pieces, but we didn’t know the drawing and we didn’t know where to put them. Buscetta gave us the drawing of the organization, of the internal rules, ”says Ayala. He found it again in 1993, when Buscetta went to the Antimaphia Parliamentary Commission. “In a pause for a coffee he approached me and said: ‘I don’t know how he will take it, but I feel a great need to shake his hand, because in his hand, I imagine, there is also Falcone’s hand.’ And we set our hands. ”
He maxiprocess It was a historical moment, a great bunker was built for the trial, with dozens of cells around the defendants, 475 mafia. In his final conclusions, Ayala spoke eight sessions in a row. “The judge told me that I could sit if I wanted, but I had all those gangsters in front and it seemed to me that I had to do it,” he says. “The day I ended up discovering the importance of adrenaline, which had evidently kept my feet, because when I sat and ended the trial I realized that I could not get up. I waited for the room to stay empty and take me two carabinieriI couldn’t walk. I was happy, he had made an unprecedented accusation. I still give me chilling to think about it and I don’t know how I did. ”
A historic condemnation followed that was a catastrophe for the mafia. The Corleonese hoped to be able to turn him around the appeal, but the sentence was final in January 1992. By then, the panorama in Palermo had changed a lot. He pool He got rid of after the first sentence, in 1987, because his responsible, Antonino Caponetto, thought he had already done his job and retired. It was taken for granted that Falcone would replace him, but then the internal mosquty, in the magistracy, in the institutions, and their progressive isolation began. The new boss disassembled the team. Falcone and Borsellino left, one with public positions in Rome, the other changed destiny in Sicily. Ayala saw how from one day to another they began to leave Mountains of Banal Affairs on the table. “They completely marginalized me. I was used to finding huge mafia process files and I saw myself there dedicated to fraud in light invoices. ” He ended up leaving the Prosecutor’s Office and entered politics in 1992.
When the great sentence against the Mafia was confirmed in January 1992, Nostra began to take revenge, and also acted against those who believed that from the State they had not fulfilled their pacts with them. Falcone was killed on May 23, 1992, the mafia flew the highway in its path, when he went from the airport to Palermo. Borsellino, on July 19, with a car bomb at his mother’s house, which he was going to visit.
Ayala had to have taken the flight to Palermo with Falcone that day, but in the end he changed plan. “If not, I would have gone in that car,” he admits. In addition, he confesses that he dragged a strange feeling of guilt, because he false that day he was driving, sometimes he did it, and the driver that day sat down and was saved: “And it was I who started doing that, driving myself, asked the minister and authorized me. And seeing it, Giovanni also asked for it, but I wouldn’t have done it if I don’t. And this weighs me as if it were my fault. ” There are many unanswered questions about this attack: how he knew the mafia that falcon that day was going to Palermo, where he got such an amount of explosive, who accessed the magistrate’s computer that night and erased data.
On Borsellino attack, one of the first to arrive at the scene was Ayala, who lived next door. Over time, paradoxically, this has become a controversial issue for him: he had in his hands the Borsellino briefcase, which had remained in his car, where the famous red agenda was in which everything pointed out and, it is supposed, the secrets he had discovered about the complicities of mafia and politics. But that agenda disappeared.
Ayala has given discordant versions of what happened, and this has brought him criticism, in a case surrounded by very strange things. “Look, I have tried to contribute to the truth, and I could have said that I did not remember anything, but the substance of my statement is clear, I had the briefcase for a moment and I gave it to an officer. I don’t remember the details, but I would like to see anyone in my place. Because when I arrived, moments before, I stumbled upon something, and when I saw me I saw that it was the carbonized trunk of a person, without arms, without legs, and I realized that it was Paolo. I would like to know if someone in my place would have a lucid memory. Then about this have been built the usual controversies, the usual poisons. ”
The borsellino attack is another great mystery. The culprits were convicted, but the official version collapsed in 2008 with an incredible script. A repentant confessed that he participated in the attack and that the defendants were innocent. Everything had been a montage. The investigation had to start over zero, and still open in 2025. Ayala is occasionally seen in Palermo with the other two judges of the pool They are still alive, Leonardo Guarnotta and Giuseppe Di Lello. “We tell ourselves that we are survivors, because luckily they stopped.” The terrible 1992 attack chain made a qualitative leap in 1993 with two unpublished elements: attacks against artistic heritage and outside Sicily. “This is the confirmation that it was not just the mafia, because it was an absolute novelty, what could care about Totò Riina of an attack in the Uffizi … This 1993 phase is absolutely atypical,” he reflects. The mafia suddenly stopped in 1994, when the entire Italian political class fell and a new one arrived, with Silvio Berlusconi and new games. “The mafia probably decided to stop to try to establish new relationships with politics, as it has always done,” says Ayala. Will we know the truth one day? “We have to believe it, and I hope to be that day, but for biological reasons I am not sure to be.”